Daily Archives: April 13, 2017

I am going to drop back and work through some images from our Wildside Nature Tours River Boat tour on the Amazon River in Peru. Toward the end of our first day on the river, motoring upriver from Iquitos, we pulled out in the skiffs to explore a little creek. We were rewarded with a Road-side Hawk (should be River-side Hawk don’t you think?) and a few other birds. Almost back to the river boat, well after sunset, I spotted this bird in the brush along the bank, and we stopped for a look and some pics. The Black Capped Donacobius is between the Wrens and the Mockingbirds in Birds of Peru, but it is the only member, so far, of its family, and there has been constant debate as to its relations and placement in the world of birds. It was once considered a Mockingbird, then moved in with the Wrens. Now there is doubt that it is either. The consensus is moving toward placing it as a far flung outcast of a family of smaller warbler like African birds from the Indian Ocean area on the basis of some physical and some behavior characteristics. Hard to say where it will settle, but it is pretty clear that it is alone in the Americas, without any close relations. It is common in marshes along rivers, and certainly common in the Amazon basin both in Peru and Brazil. We would encounter it several times in our exploration of creeks along the Amazon.